It’s never too late to find your dream. There is life after tampons. It’s your time to please yourself instead of everyone around you– your parents, your children, the men in your life. Pleasing is a hard habit to break. As women we were trained early to put others first. But now, it’s your turn to chase that dream you lost while pleasing others.
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Like that long ago boyfriend in the back seat of his daddy’s car, both presidential candidates will promise anything in the heat of passion. Maybe they honestly believe they can deliver on their promise, “I need you baby. Trust me and we’ll live happily ever after.” But, deep in our hearts we know there’s no way they can deliver on that happily ever after. The country is broke. Daddy’s wallet is empty.
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This October has been one rough month for most of us. If we haven’t been battered financially, we wonder when we might get hit, or know a friend or family member worried about losing their job or their home. If that isn’t bad enough, we get smacked with political “Anything you can do I can do better” comments from candidates if we flip on the TV or radio, or settle down with the Seattle pi. And if we really want to get down and dirty we can link into some women’s blogs about Sarah Palin.
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When you browse the collection of poems and short stories in Love After 70 from Wising Up Press, Decatur, Georgia, brew a cup of tea and find a comfortable chair. This is the type of book that pulls you in and tugs at your heart. Even if you’ve tucked that when I’m seventy idea to the back of your mind, these stories and poems are about someone close to you– a parent, the lady down the hall, or that elderly man in your church circle who wraps up his cake to share with his wife when he visits her in the care center.
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After 70, life goes on, love goes on, as we’re reminded in the contemporary anthology, Love After 70 by Wising Up Press. In a collection of short stories and poems by over fifty writers, you’ll find sad and funny, and a glimpse at life after 70. As the book cover tells us, “Until we get there, we don’t know what the age is really like. And until we ask, those who have been there may not volunteer their road maps. But we are the richer, wiser, and more lively for them.”
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Many women find dieting a large part of their life, their self image determined by whether they can fit into those skinny jeans. Linda Appleman Shapiro, psychotherapist and author of Four Rooms, Upstairs: A Psychotherapist’s Journey Into and Beyond her Mother’s Mental Illness, responded to an article in the NY Times August 10, 2008 Fashion Section. In Linda’s blog, A Psychotherapist’s Journey, she writes:
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Many of us can dig into our family history and find mental illness, that muddy little secret the family tied up with the dirty laundry and hid in the darkest corner. Four Rooms, Upstairs, by Linda Appleman Shapiro, tells of her family’s struggle to understand the wife and mother they lived with in those Four Rooms, Upstairs during the l940s and 50s when mental illness was misunderstood and often left untreated, or treated with electric shock therapy.
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Like many women disillusioned by a patriartic church, Barbara Stahura spent years searching for her spiritual truth. “Maybe it’s time to give up what you think you know,” Barbara was once told. During her spiritual wanderings, Barbara wrote and published several personal essays which became her book What I Thought I Knew.
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What I Thought I Knew, a collection of personal essays about midlife love by Barbara Stahura digs into the heart of any woman who’s looked for love the second time around. With honesty and humor, Barbara tells about stumbling through relationships, sometimes questioning her own self-worth, searching for Mr. Right.
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Lyn’s Circle began less than a year ago as a forum for all women’s issues. We bounced around on the topics of Seasonal Affective Depression (SAD), widows, loneliness, and settled in on domestic violence during the summer. It’s time to move to another topic. I’ve had requests to cover sandwich caregivers, feminism, and weight control. With winter not far off, SAD will be knocking at the door again, too.
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